In this spellbinding book Merilyn Simonds dazzles us with her storytelling gift and her lucid, highly charged prose. Inspired by selected moments and events from a life, these richly layered stories distil memory into compelling narratives that veer deftly from the personal to the universal.
Transporting the reader from Brazil, Canada, and Sweden, to Mexico, Greece and Hawaii, Simonds brilliantly juxtaposes a sense of place with specific elements from a life at its turning points. In the title story, the narrator inhabits a child's private realm within the maze of corridors and rooms of a hotel in central Brazil. Later, a toy gun from a cowgirl costume becomes the symbol of something all too real, a strange prop in the relationship between a daughter and her father. Against the sensuous and exotic backdrop of the Ontario woods, amid the revolving seasons and nature's endless regeneration, a husband and wife cope as their marriage falters then cracks. And in the moving final story, a village in Southern Ontario lies shrouded in the past until the death of a parent unlocks the grief of a child's tragic death years before, propelling the book to its indelible, resonant close.
'The Lion In The Room Next Door' is a daring, beautiful work of the imagination, drawn from life and deeply affecting in its unremitting exploration of a woman's mind and heart.
